Peta Mc Sharry
The race is in her legs.
Her knowledge is in your planning.
Peta McSharry has been bikepacking since 2012 and racing ultra-distance events since the inaugural TransAm Bike Race. She has raced Tour Divide, the inaugural Silk Road Mountain Race, the Taurus Mountain Race, the Transcontinental Race, the Hope 1000, Route 66, and Paris-Brest-Paris. She is a British Cycling Level 3 performance coach, a sports massage therapist, and holds a qualification in designing and delivering learning for adults. The last of those shapes everything about how the coaching is structured—how knowledge is delivered, when it lands, and why athletes retain it under race conditions.
Coaching framework
The coaching framework was not assembled from textbooks. It was built from watching athletes prepare for and fail at these races—including herself—and working backwards from those failures to understand what preparation actually requires.
Not sure which plan is right for you?
Happy for a quick chat to see if I am the right coach and which plan will deliver the best for your needs and budget.
Race history
Coaching built on lived race experience
Every plan I build blends two things: my own experience in some of the hardest bikepacking races out there, and the honest, detailed feedback athletes bring back from the same events. That insight, along with the race analysis that won Best Dotwatcher in 2022 and 2023, means your coaching is grounded in what actually happens out on course—not just what the map suggests.
The result is coaching grounded in real-world experience, careful analysis, and a plan that prepares you for the race you are actually going to ride.
2022 + 2024
Eight hour snow push over Red Meadow Lake in -2°C is possibly the hardest thing I've done on a bike.
2018
The inaugural SRMR, there was nothing to judge how hard this would be or that a mountain bike was a better choice than a gravel bike.
2014
First edition and a film to go with it, Inspired to Ride, I made it into the film but a blown up Achilles stopped me in my tracks.
2014
Sign up for the first edition, 2 wedding put paid to that and I went to the start line the following year.
2016
2015
A dream to ride since 2007, this was an incredible experience and one I'd highly recommend just for the support along the route.
2021
What a beast. When a few people say, 'you're doing it on that bike' (gravel), you know the going is not an easy ride. Take a mountain bike if you try this one. Freddy is waiting.
Upcoming
Let's see how this one goes, I'm there for the party pace and to get a feel for how the route rides. I need more muscles and they are hard to build (at my age).
Of course, I've done more races but these are the highlights. I also live vicariously through my athletes and get to study a lot more races that I do and find out so much more in the post race debriefs.
The training methodology
What the training builds — and why FTP isn't the whole answer.
FTP tells you something true about your fitness. It is part of how every training plan here is structured. What it doesn't tell you is how that fitness holds up beyond day four—when you've been riding since before dawn, when your posture is starting to collapse, when your decisions are beginning to cost you time you can't get back. The athletes who perform well in these races aren't always the ones with the highest FTP. They're the ones whose training prepared them to keep functioning when everything around them was getting harder.
Understand the demands of the race
Building your durability
Every race has a shape—the climbing, the heat, the days without proper sleep, the point where most riders start losing power simply because their body has run out. These plans aim to find this out in training and build you towards your race demands. They slow down the leak of power in the race through carefully structured training blocks, strength training, core workouts and yoga.
That's what this training is built for: not just raising your ceiling, but extending how long you can ride near it.
It doesn't guarantee a finish. These are genuinely hard events, and even well-prepared athletes scratch. What it does is make sure that if you stop, it's a real decision — not legs and a brain that gave out before they had to.
How this coaching is built
Forged by racing — sharpened by watching every detail
The coaching system here was built from two habits. The first is racing, and the structured debrief that follows every A-race—a process that turns what happened on the route into something repeatable, rather than letting it stay a memory. The second is watching. Years spent following these races closely enough, and analysing them rigorously enough, to be recognised twice as Dotwatcher of the Year for the depth of that analysis.
Both habits point at the same question: what is actually happening to the riders who are still making good decisions at day six? Most race coverage stops at split times and finishing positions. This coaching exists because the real answer lives somewhere else—in durability, in self-knowledge, in planning built for a specific rider under specific fatigue.
Analysing what matters
Not just the workouts, but who you are
That's what the analysis is for. Not watching for its own sake—watching closely enough to find what needs fixing, and building it into the plan before you get to the start line.
This is also where the portal and the workshops came from. The portal came first—a structured planning resource built from race and debrief experience. The monthly workshops developed from using that resource with athletes, once it became clear that knowledge delivered live landed differently than a resource worked through alone. The pre workshop analysis drew laughter on the calls out of recognition that athletes were not really the aspirational character they portray in the survey.
Coaching philosophy
Why Peta coaches the way she does
Two options for 1:1 coaching or build your base build and switch to the race plan.
Self-knowledge before speed
The base of the hierarchy is 'Know Yourself'—not because it sounds good but because athletes who don't understand their own recovery, life stress or planning patterns will make the same mistakes in the race that they make in training.
The coaching relationship takes time
A plan is only as accurate as the coach's knowledge of the athlete and what the athlete knows about themself. That knowledge develops over months—how they actually train versus how they say they train, how they respond to fatigue and stress. I can't presume to know everything about you, what i can do is use systems for you to communicate key elements in training and planning.
Knowledge delivered at the right moment
Information given too early is forgotten. Information given too late creates panic. The portal modules, and coaching conversations are all sequenced around when each piece of knowledge is most useful. The knowledge workshops are delivered from January to May.
Growth, not survival
The goal is not just to help athletes survive these races. It is to help them grow through the preparation and arrive at the start line knowing themselves well enough to race with intention.
Community as a coaching tool
Preparing alone is harder than it needs to be. The monthly workshops create the conditions for a group to form. What happens from there is between the athletes.
Qualifications and skills
What they mean in practice
Coached athlete · Monthly group call contributor · Author
Meaghan Hackinen
Meaghan is a coached athlete. She trains under this coaching system and co-hosts the knowledge workshops, sharing her experience and valuable knowledge in these monthly gatherings.
She's achieved some of the highest accolades in the bikepacking world:
Tour Divide — women's Grand Depart record 2024
Tour Divide — women's Grand Depart winner 2024
Silk Road Mountain Race — winner
Hellenic Mountain Race — winner
Atlas Mountain Race — 2nd
She's been coached under this system for three years and it's been a joy to watch her growth during this time—not all credit to me but rather her high standards of training and willingness to take on board some of my suggestions.
Meaghan's website
Which plan is right for your
A quick guide before you book a call.
Most people leave the 15-minute enquiry call knowing exactly which plan is right for them. But if you want a sense before you get there:
Ready to start
Book a 15-minute enquiry call
Free. 15 minutes. The fastest way to find out which plan is right for your race, your timeline, and your situation.
Traditional Advanced has a genuine cap on places. If you're considering it, the earlier you have this conversation the better.
Ready to start
Send an enquiry
If you are interested in a plan, send an enquiry form and I will respond via email.
Let me know your race, when you would like to start and which package you are interested in and I will get you up and running.